Alfresco 3.4 Powers Collaborative Web Development and New Tools for Spring Developers

Alfresco Web Quick Start with office-to-web framework, with new developer services for Spring, give users the power to create, collaborate and publish across the web

LONDON—October 4, 2010 — Alfresco, the open platform for social content management, today announced the immediate availability of Alfresco Community 3.4 for download. Alfresco 3.4 broadens the reach of the company’s open source and open standards-based content management platform with new tools and services for Spring developers, Web Quick Start for easy web site deployment and content integration with enterprise portals. This builds on Alfresco’s strategy of offering the industry’s only content platform that delivers the flexibility and affordability required across the enterprise.

“The demand for collaboration and social sharing around enterprise content is rising – and content that was once meant just for the intranet is now being repurposed for the public web, external portals or even to destination sites across the web,” said John Newton, Alfresco CTO. “Through our implementation of CMIS as a core standard and new features in Alfresco 3.4, our content services platform can now manage and deliver enterprise content to any internal or external application in a way that traditional, monolithic ECM products can’t enable without significant time and expense.”

Key product capabilities for the Alfresco Community 3.4 release include:

Collaborative Web Authoring – Alfresco Web Quick Start is a set of out-of-the-box templates for building content-rich websites on top of Alfresco Share. Quick Start combines the power of Alfresco Share for web team collaboration, with powerful content authoring and publishing services like in-context web editing.

Office-to-Web Framework* – Using Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Protocol and CIFS (shared file drive), along with a new API integration with Google Docs, users can now author documents in their native office suite, collaborate in Alfresco or Google Docs, transform and re-purpose if required, and then publish straight to the web – even with sophisticated approval workflows.

Web Content Services for Spring – Built using the popular Spring and Spring Surf frameworks, Alfresco now offers key content management services that can be accessed via OpenCMIS and integrated into any web application. A combination of standard development tools and lightweight scripting gives Spring and Surf developers many options for building content-rich apps.

Integration with Enterprise Portals and Social Software – The new DocLib portlets allow seamless integration with enterprise portals like Liferay, Quickr and Confluence. Using Single Sign On (SSO), the portlets provide access to both content and project repositories from within any JSR168 compliant portal.

Distributed Content Replication – Native support for content replication allows organizations to run federated content repositories. Key documents can now be replicated to remote offices, enabling greater sharing of information, quicker access, reduced wide area network traffic and removes the dependency on a single system.

"The increasingly networked nature of business has amplified existing requirements for individuals to collaboratively author, review, and publish content, as well as to quickly build websites using that content,” said Larry Hawes, Lead Analyst, Collaboration & Enterprise Social Software, Gilbane Group. “Alfresco's 3.4 release exposes more content management features within Share and third-party collaboration environments, empowering business people to quickly work together to create and publish content to websites, portals, and social software."

Alfresco has seen major adoption of its open source and open standards content management platform throughout the world, with more than two million downloads of Alfresco Community. Alfresco Community is a free-to-download, free-to-use version developed on an open source stack that runs on Windows, Linux or Mac. Alfresco Community members are able to access and share knowledge on the Alfresco Wiki and Forums and contribute extensions on the Alfresco Forge.

Alfresco Enterprise is certified against a larger range of technology stacks (both open source and proprietary), goes through a more extensive QA process and is provided with full commercial technical support.

*The following functionality will be available in a follow-on release Alfresco Community 3.4.b in approximately four weeks:

Vertical-specific Quick Start Sites – Three different Quick Start sites designed for the finance, government and media/entertainment industries